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"The project of Greater Serbia," I was once told by one of the many pessimistic intellectuals in Skopje, "has within it the incurable tumor of Greater Albania. And this cancer will metastasize in Macedonia." The "logic" of enclosing all contiguous minorities into one state, and mustering them all under one flag, was the essence of the Milosevic scheme until it brought destruction on itself. The urgent question now is whether the large Albanian populations living next to Albania in Kosovo and Macedonia have assimilated this lesson or have decided to try to improve on it.

Depleted uranium constitutes one of largest
radioactive and toxic-waste byproducts of the nuclear age. Over the
past half-century, 700,000 metric tons of DU--more than half of all
the uranium ever mined in the world--was produced at three
government-owned uranium enrichment plants in Oak Ridge, Tennessee;
Paducah, Kentucky; and Portsmouth, Ohio. This DU now sits in some
50,000 steel cylinders, each weighing about thirteen tons, stacked in
huge piles outside the enrichment plants. A major leak in one of the
cylinders could pose an acute risk to workers and the public. After
years of prodding, DOE is starting a multibillion-dollar effort to
convert these wastes to a safer form.

DU is less
radioactive than other isotopes and is officially considered to be
more of a toxic than a radiological hazard. However, whatever the
case with the most common form of DU, there are other forms that have
been proven highly dangerous. From the early 1950s through the 1970s,
some 150,000 tons of uranium, containing plutonium-239 and larger
amounts of equally dangerous neptunium-237, were recycled from
nuclear-weapons production reactors and processed at the three
gaseous-diffusion plants. This material also went throughout the DOE
nuclear-weapons production complex in several states, and some
apparently found its way to the Persian Gulf and Balkans
battlefields.

According to a DOE study released this past
January (www.eh.doe.gov/benefits), workers who handled recycled
uranium at the Paducah plant between the 1950s and 1970s were heavily
exposed. The report noted that some workers were required to strike
large cloth-filter bags with metal rods to remove heavy
concentrations of uranium laced with neptunium and plutonium. They
were given little protection, and no effort was made to measure
exposures or inform workers about the dangers of handling this
material because the union might have demanded hazard
pay.

Workers' exposure risks were revealed in an official
review of DOE occupational epidemiological studies, which found that
workers at fourteen DOE facilities bore increased death risks from
cancer and other diseases following exposure to radiation and other
substances. Excess deaths from various cancers and nonmalignant lung
and kidney diseases were found among uranium workers at six
facilities. This report prompted the Energy Department to concede
officially on January 28, 2000, that its employees were harmed by
workplace exposures, and it served as an underpinning for a major
nuclear-weapons worker-compensation program enacted by Congress last
year. Under the new law, workers at the three gaseous-diffusion
plants exposed to recycled reactor uranium are eligible to receive
compensation for twenty-two listed cancers through a process in which
the burden of proof is shifted to the government.

Workers
are not the only casualties of the cold war uranium mess. The
National Academy of Sciences concluded last year that large areas at
DOE nuclear-material production sites cannot be cleaned up to safe
levels and will require indefinite, long-term institutional controls.
Official cost estimates to deal with this daunting problem are $365
billion and climbing. In effect, the production of depleted uranium
and other nuclear materials may have created de facto "national
sacrifice zones." Meanwhile, the Pentagon gets DU free of charge, as
our nation pays an enormous cost in terms of workers, the
environment, public safety and the US Treasury.

This is not about profits and
patents; it's about poverty and a devastating disease." That
statement did not come from AIDS activists struggling to provide
sub-Saharan Africa's 25 million HIV-positive people with access to
life-extending medications. It came from the executive vice president
of Bristol-Myers Squibb, which recently announced it would slash
prices on its two AIDS drugs and forgo patents on one of them. A week
earlier, Merck & Co. said it would lower prices on its two AIDS
drugs not just in Africa but, pending review, in other heavily
affected countries as well.

What's going on is not a
change of heart on the part of "Big Pharma"--which John le
Carré describes in this issue as a group of
"multibillion-dollar multinational corporations that view the
exploitation of the world's sick and dying as a sacred duty to their
shareholders." Far from being a humanitarian action, the price
reductions represent an attempt to preserve patent rights by
diffusing international pressure for generic manufacturing.
Revealingly, neither BMS nor Merck has withdrawn from a suit against
the South African government brought by thirty-nine pharmaceuticals
seeking to prohibit importation of generic drugs, which they claim
would violate their patents.

The Indian generic
manufacturer Cipla announced in February that it would sell the
entire AIDS triple-therapy combination at $350 per person, per year,
and other generic manufacturers, in Thailand and Brazil, currently
offer AIDS drugs at a fraction of multinational prices. By
comparison, the Wall Street Journal reported that a
combination of AIDS drugs from BMS and Merck would cost between $865
and $965 per person, per year. If those prices were multiplied by the
number of AIDS patients in, say, Zimbabwe, a relatively prosperous
country by African standards, the total would come to about 20
percent of its GDP. And that sum doesn't include the investments in
healthcare infrastructure needed to distribute and monitor the drugs'
use.

But even if poor African countries could somehow find
the money to pay the high patent-protected prices of the drug giants
(the $26.6 billion a year it would cost to provide all Africa with
AIDS drugs is no more than about a third of what Bush's tax plan
would give to America's wealthiest 1 percent), that would not be the
end of their problems. Rather, such a course would lock them into
exclusive trade agreements with multinationals and put them at the
continual mercy of Western foreign aid budgets. As new treatments are
developed, Africa would have to negotiate new price reductions,
country by country, company by company.

If the solutions
lie with generic manufacturing (not just for AIDS medications but for
a slew of vital drugs for malaria and other ills), then circumventing
existing international patent regulations is a necessity. The trial
in South Africa over compulsory licensing is one crucial test of the
viability of this option. Another potential plan would be for the
National Institutes of Health to give patents owned by the US
government on publicly funded AIDS drugs to the World Health
Organization, thereby licensing it to oversee generic manufacturing.
Why not, in fact, let governments underwrite the entire cost of drug
research--rather than, as now, underwriting substantial amounts of
the research, which drug companies then exploit--and do away with
patents altogether?

Ariel Sharon's election as Israeli Prime Minister insures a prolonged pause in progress toward Israeli-Palestinian peace. While awaiting his successor, politicians and commentators could occupy their time constructively by adopting a new "language of peace." Dangerously misleading terminology remains a major obstacle to a resolution of the conflict.

It is normal practice for parties to a dispute to use language that favors them. In this regard, Israel has been spectacularly successful in imposing its terminology not simply on Israeli and American consciousness but even on many Arab parties and commentators. It has done so not simply in obvious ways like use of the terms "terrorism," "security" and "Judea and Samaria" but also in more subtle ways.

There is much talk of "concessions" being demanded from and offered by Israel. This word suggests the surrender of some legitimate right or position. In fact, while Israel demands numerous concessions from Palestine, Palestine is not seeking any concessions from Israel. What it is insisting upon is "compliance"--compliance with agreements already signed, compliance with international law and compliance with relevant UN resolutions--nothing more and nothing less. Compliance is not a concession. It is an obligation, both legally and morally.

The concept of "compliance" is well entrenched in Iraq's case. Partial Iraqi compliance with UN resolutions is rarely hailed as a "concession"--"painful," "far-reaching," "unprecedented" or otherwise. In Iraq's case, anything less than full compliance is deemed "defiance"--at least by the United States. Notwithstanding Israel's eventual full compliance on its Egyptian, Jordanian and Lebanese borders, most Israelis still believe, with the encouragement of successive US administrations, that peace with Palestine can be achieved without compliance. This is most unlikely--but how many more, on both sides, will die before the logic of "compliance" replaces the false generosity of "concessions"?

The Palestinian territories conquered by Israel in 1967 are frequently referred to as "disputed." They are not. They are "occupied," illegally so. While sovereignty over expanded East Jerusalem is explicitly contested, none of the world's other 192 sovereign states have recognized Israel's sovereignty claim, and Palestinian sovereignty over the Gaza Strip and the rest of the West Bank is, in both literal and legal senses, uncontested.

Israel has never even purported to annex these territories. Since November 15, 1988, when Palestinian independence and statehood were formally proclaimed, the only state asserting sovereignty over those portions of historical Palestine that Israel occupied in 1967 (aside from expanded East Jerusalem) has been the State of Palestine.

Commentators on all sides speak of Israel "ceding" territory to Palestine or to "the Palestinians." This word suggests a transfer of land by its legitimate owner. Israel can withdraw from occupied Palestinian lands, but the only land it could legitimately cede would be land inside its internationally recognized, pre-1967 borders (a possibility discussed in pre-election peace negotiations). Indeed, Israel continues to insist that Palestine cede to Israel indisputably Palestinian lands forming part of the meager 22 percent of historical Palestine that Israel did not conquer until 1967. How fair, reasonable and genuinely peace-seeking is this?

Misleading language has been particularly destructive with respect to Jerusalem. For years, Israeli politicians have repeated like a mantra that "Jerusalem must remain united under Israeli sovereignty." Understandably, most Israelis believe that Israel currently possesses sovereignty over Jerusalem. It does not. It possesses only administrative control. While a country can acquire administrative control by force of arms, it can acquire sovereignty (the state-level equivalent of title or ownership) only with the consent of the international community.

The position of the international community is clear and categorical: Israel is in military occupation of East Jerusalem (including the Old City, site of the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount) and has only de facto authority over West Jerusalem. The refusal of virtually all countries (even including the United States) to recognize West Jerusalem as Israel's capital vividly demonstrates the refusal of the international community to concede, yet, that any part of the city is Israel's sovereign territory.

There can thus be no question of Israel "relinquishing" or "transferring" sovereignty over any part of Jerusalem. Indeed, the only way that Israel will ever acquire sovereignty over any part of the city is by agreeing with Palestine on a basis for either sharing or dividing it (or doing a bit of both) that is recognized as fair and accepted by the international community.

This distinction is of fundamental intellectual and psychological importance for Israeli public opinion. There is a world of difference between being perceived as the Israeli leader who achieved Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem for the first time in 2,000 years and being perceived as the one who relinquished some degree of Jewish sovereignty over the city.

One word that has been too rarely used in connection with the "peace process" is "justice." For obvious reasons, it is never used by Israeli or American politicians as a component of the "peace" they envision. Yet a true and lasting peace, as opposed to a mere temporary cessation of hostilities, is inconceivable unless some measure of justice is achieved. It is high time for all involved to recognize and speak clearly about these fundamental realities. Peace may depend on it.

The air now quivers with gloomy assessments of the secrets "compromised" by the FBI's Robert Hanssen, a senior official who stands accused of working for the Russians since 1985. If you believe the FBI affidavit against him filed in federal court, Hanssen betrayed spies working for the United States, some of whom were then executed. Among many other feats, he allegedly ratted on "an entire technical program of enormous value, expense and importance to the United States," which turns out to have been the construction of a tunnel under the new Soviet Embassy in Washington. He also trundled documents by the cartload to "dead drops" in various suburbs around Washington.

It's amusing to listen to the US counterintelligence officials now scorning Hanssen for lack of "tradecraft" in using the same drop week after week. These are the same counterintelligence officials who remained incurious across the decades about the tinny clang of empty drawers in their top secret filing cabinets, all contents removed on a daily basis by Hanssen and the CIA's Aldrich Ames, who deemed the use of copy machines too laborious. In just one assignment, the CIA later calculated, Ames gave the KGB a stack of documents estimated to be fifteen to twenty feet high. Hanssen was slack about "tradecraft" because he knew just how remote the possibility of discovery was. The only risk he couldn't accurately assess was the one that brought him down--betrayal by a Russian official privy to the material he was sending to Moscow.

The record of proven failure by US intelligence agencies is long and dismal. To take two of the most notorious derelictions, the CIA failed to predict the Sino-Soviet split and failed to notice that the Soviet Union was falling apart, a lapse the agency later tried to blame on Ames. In the mid-1990s Director of Central Intelligence John Deutch testified to Congress that "taken as a whole" Ames's activities "facilitated the Soviet, and later the Russian, effort to engage in 'perception management operations' by feeding carefully selected information to the United States through agents whom they were controlling without our knowledge.... one of the primary purposes of the perception management program was to convince us that the Soviets remained a superpower and that their military R&D program was robust."

So here was Deutch (himself scandalously pardoned by Clinton after personally perpetrating some of the most egregious security lapses in the CIA's history) claiming that treachery by its man Ames was the reason the CIA failed to notice that the Soviet Union was falling apart. Following that line of analysis, Ames could have entered a plea of innocence on the grounds that in helping the Soviet Union exaggerate its might he was only following official agency policy. One of the prime functions of the CIA in the cold war years was to inflate the military capabilities of the Soviet Union, thereby assisting military contractors and their allies in Congress and the Pentagon in the extraction of money to build more weapons to counter these entirely imaginary Soviet threats.

Back in the mid-1970s CIA Director George H.W. Bush found that the regular CIA analysts were making insufficiently alarmist assessments of Soviet might and promptly installed Team B, a group replete with trained exaggerators, who contrived the lies necessary to justify the soaring Pentagon procurement budgets of the Reagan eighties.

Reviewing this torrent of lies at the start of the 1980s, my brother Andrew Cockburn wrote The Threat, a pitilessly accurate estimate of Soviet military potential based on interviews with sources recruited by Andrew's tradecraft, some of said sources being Russian immigrants, many of them living in Brighton Beach, New York. He described how the US civil and, more serious, military intelligence organizations were grotesquely miscalculating the Soviet defense budget and routinely faking the capabilities of its weapons.

Military experts pooh-poohed Andrew's findings, as did many of the liberal Pentagon watchdogs, who found it too offensively simple to say that Soviet weapons were badly made and overseen by semi-mutinous drunks. But as history was soon to show, Andrew had it right. Against the entire US budget for spying on the Soviet Union's military potential you could set the money necessary to buy The Threat and come out with superior information.

Real secrets, excitedly relayed to one another by the mighty, don't concern weapons but gossip: the exact capabilities of Dick Cheney's heart, the precise amount of cocaine sold by George Bush at Yale and so forth. This was the kind of stuff J. Edgar Hoover kept in his office safe. The nation's real intelligence work is being done by the National Enquirer. We could cut off the CIA's and FBI's intelligence budgets and improve the security of this nation at once.

A final parable, about another US intelligence debacle: failure to predict Egypt's attack on Israel in the Yom Kippur war in October of 1973. A CIA analyst called Fred Fear had noticed earlier that year that the Egyptians were buying a lot of bridging equipment from the Russians. Assessing the nature and amount of this equipment, Fear figured out where the bridges would be deployed across the Suez Canal and how many troops could get across them. He wrote a report, with maps, predicting the Egyptian attack. His superiors ignored it until the onslaught took place. Then they hauled it out, tore off the maps and sent them to the White House, labeled as "current intelligence."

While the Egyptians were planning the Yom Kippur assault, they discovered that the Israelis had built a defensive sand wall. Tests disclosed that the best way to breach this wall would be with high-pressure hoses. So they ordered the necessary fire hoses from a firm in West Germany, putting out the cover story that Sadat was promising a fire engine to every Egyptian village. Then a strike in the West German hose factory held up production into the fall of 1973. As the days ticked away, the desperate Egyptians finally deployed all Egyptian cargo planes to Frankfurt to pick up the fire hoses. The planes crammed the airfield. Frankfurt is a notorious hub for intelligence agencies. None of them noticed.

About a year and a half ago I received a book from Bosnia. Its title was I Begged Them to Kill Me. It was a collection of some forty accounts by Muslim women who were raped, mostly by Serbian soldiers and paramilitaries in 1992. During the past ten years several collections of the same kind have been published, but this one was different because the raped women themselves, organized into the Association of Camp Inmates-Canton Sarajevo, collected and published it. They had decided to spread the information about what had happened to them without the help of journalists or experts, or even a professional editor.

This book, bearing all the signs of amateurism, is nonetheless an important and moving document of suffering we thought we had heard and known all about. The anonymous women speak of the unspeakable--of rape, torture, enslavement, forced pregnancy, the selling of women as slaves. This is a very special book to me. The women from the association sent it to me with a dedication because of my book S: A Novel About the Balkans, which also deals with mass rape. I admire their decision to publish their accounts in the belief that their truth deserved to be heard.

Women who were raped before them, in Germany, China and Korea during the two world wars, rarely spoke about it in public. It was not to be mentioned but to be forgotten. Indeed, it was forgotten. However, the raped women in Bosnia believed in the possibility of justice through the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia in The Hague, established by the UN Security Council in 1993. And they understood that justice could not be done without their help. In the book, all of the violated women say they would volunteer as witnesses in that court, and many did. Not in a local court but the international one--because they know very well that the culprits will not be brought to court in their own country. Who would arrest them? Who would put them on trial? What kind of sentences would they get? They had only "had fun."

Agreeing to testify as witnesses in The Hague was a brave, even heroic step for the raped Bosnian women. To the world they had to say, "Yes, I was raped!" They had to live with that confession afterward--with their children and husbands, their brothers and fathers, their community. And this is not liberal Berlin or Stockholm, marked by decades of women's emancipation.

Without these brave women, what would have happened? What would have happened in the trial of Dragoljub Kunarac, Radomir Kovac and Zoran Vukovic, three men from Foca who, on February 22, received sentences in The Hague of from twelve to twenty-eight years in prison? Most likely they would be living free in Foca, every day passing by the Partizan Sports Hall where they kept their Muslim prisoners, then by the houses where they kept enslaved women. They would sit in a cafe smoking cigarettes and drinking brandy, telling anecdotes from the war. If any of their victims happened to pass by, they would point at her with their finger and laugh. Indeed, if these women had kept their "shame" to themselves, the three men would not have entered history. Now they are the first men ever to be sentenced exclusively for sexual crimes defined as crimes against humanity--systematic mass rape, sexual enslavement and torture of women and girls during war. This was only possible thanks to the Bosnian women who did not shut up. Perhaps this time it was impossible not to speak--there were too many women violated (a UN report put the number at 20,000, but that is only an estimate). There were also too many journalists around, too many experts and humanitarian workers, people willing to listen and to help.

No matter what made them speak, the women from the book and the other violated Bosnian women are the real heroes of this historical trial, the women who were not supposed to speak. That was exactly what the three men from Foca were counting on--their silence. I wish I had been in the courtroom when the three men received their sentences. What was in their eyes? Disbelief? Despair? Never could they have imagined that any of those women would have the courage to stand up and face them in court. The men must have thought it was a joke when they heard that they were going to be on trial for rape. OK, perhaps they were rude sometimes if the imprisoned women were not obedient. So what? Never could they have imagined that they would get such heavy sentences. After all, they did not even kill anybody. And among those who did kill, there were some who got much lighter sentences. How is that possible? they must have wondered. I wish I had seen that discrepancy on their faces, a discrepancy between what they believed they did (and what perhaps they might have thought was wrong but certainly not a crime)--and what was deemed a crime against humanity by the international court.

When I asked the women from the Association of Camp Inmates-Canton Sarajevo how I could help them, they asked if I could give them a fax machine. They have nothing, not even their own office. A fax machine would mean a lot to them. Not only to spread information but to enable them to fight to be recognized as war victims in their own society, and to get at least some social aid. There is symbolism in their request: They are still not willing to shut up. Recently I received a thank-you letter from them, via fax. They are grateful for the machine, they wrote. But I and millions of other women are grateful to them because they spoke up and changed something for us, too.

Those who claim that this destructive cult’s ideology reflects some essential aspect of Islam are obscuring its origins—in George W. Bush’s illegal war that destroyed Iraq and fomented sectarian extremism.